and
Himmler visit a
VoMi display of proposed rural German settlements in the East, March 1941. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany launched forced starvations and advanced a "war of annihilation" (
Vernichtungskrieg) in the
Eastern Front to implement the . The
Wehrmacht implemented
scorched-earth tactics throughout the region and forcibly expelled natives en masse to the east. Nazi officials then charted out buffer zones intended to serve as future Nordic settlements.
Hunger Plan was Nazi Germany's strategy to forcibly starve around 31 to 45 million Eastern Europeans by capturing food stocks and redirecting them to German forces.
Baltic region Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were to be deprived of their statehood, while their territories were to be included in the area of German settlement. This meant that Latvia and especially Lithuania would be covered by the deportation plans, though in a somewhat milder form than the expulsion of
Slavs to western Siberia. While the Estonians would be spared repressions and physical liquidation (that the Jews and the Poles were experiencing), in the long term the Nazi planners did not foresee their existence as independent entities and they would ultimately be deported as well, with eventual denationalisation; initial designs were for Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia to be Germanised within 25 years; Heinrich Himmler revised them to 20 years. Despite German opposition to their attempts of state-formation, Baltic natives were classified as "superior" to Slavs in the Nazi racial hierarchy. Therefore, German authorities implemented a deeper scale of collaborationist policy in the Baltic society. Nazi collaborationists amongst the Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian natives were given senior posts in the administrative bodies of the German occupation. In
German-occupied Lithuania, a civilian administration which controlled its internal security was tolerated. This semi-autonomous entity existed within the
Reichskommissariat Ostland. Such concessions were non-existent in
Poland,
Ukraine and
Belarussia, where the Germanic occupation policy was characterised by full-blown
colonization, exploitation of resources, state-terrorism and forcing natives into
slave labour.
Belarus RSHA's GPO program had categorised 75% of
Belarusians as "
Eindeutschungsunfähig" (trans: "ineligible for Germanization"); targeting them for
ethnic cleansing or violent eradication. After forcibly expelling or exterminating an estimated 5–6 million of its native inhabitants, these lands were then supposed to be handed over to Germanic settlers for implementing the
Lebensraum agenda.
Czech lands In 1940, Hitler agreed that around half of the
Czech population were suitable for Germanization, including the
kidnapping of thousands of Czech children to be brought up as Germans, while the others deemed not "racially valuable" (i.e. "
Untermensch") and the Czech intelligentsia were not to be Germanized and were instead to be “deprived of [their] power, eliminated, and shipped out of the country by all sorts of methods.” Under , the Nazis had intended to displace the un-Germanizable population to
Siberia. However, due to the war effort's need for labor, this plan was never implemented.
Poland . It depicts pockets of German colonists resettling into
Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany from Soviet-controlled territories during the
Heim ins Reich action. The outline of Poland (here superimposed in red) was missing from the original poster. In 1941, the German leadership decided to destroy the
Polish nation completely, and in 15–20 years the Polish state under German occupation was to be fully cleared of any ethnic Poles and settled by German colonists. A majority of them, now
deprived of their leaders and
most of their intelligentsia (through mass murder,
destruction of culture, banning education above the absolutely basic level, and
kidnapping of children for
Germanization), would have to be deported to regions in the East and scattered over as wide an area of Western Siberia as possible. According to the plan, this would result in their
assimilation by the local populations, which would cause the Poles to vanish as a nation. Approximately two million ethnic Poles were subjected to a forced
Germanization campaign as part of the GPO. According to the plan, by 1952 only about 3–4 million 'non-Germanized' Poles (all of them peasants) were to be left residing in the former Poland. Those of them who would still not Germanize were to be forbidden to marry, the existing ban on any medical help to Poles in Germany would be extended, and eventually Poles would cease to exist. Experiments in mass sterilization in concentration camps may also have been intended for use on the populations. The
Wehrbauer, or soldier-peasants, would be settled in a fortified line to prevent civilization reanimating beyond the
Ural Mountains and threatening Germany. "
Tough peasant races" would serve as a bulwark against attackhowever, it was not very far east of the "frontier" that the
westernmost reaches within continental Asia of the Nazi Germany's major Axis partner, the
Empire of Japan's own
Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere would have existed, had a complete defeat of the Soviet Union occurred.
Russia Hitler envisioned the war in Eastern Europe as a
campaign of annihilation, intending to culminate it with the decimation of the Russian state, its cities, and symbols of Russian culture in the event of a Nazi victory. On 21 July 1940, Hitler ordered German army commander-in-chief
Walther von Brauchitsch to prepare a war-plan to eliminate what he described as the "Russian problem". In a meeting before
Wehrmacht military commanders on 31 July 1940, Hitler announced his "final decision" to "finish off" Russia through the initiation of a large military invasion in the spring of 1941. During
Operation Barbarossa, German soldiers ruthlessly perpetrated
mass-slaughter of Russian captives as part of the GPO. Out of the 3.2 million Soviet prisoners captured by German forces by December 1941, approximately 2 million had been killed by February 1942, mostly through forced starvation,
death marches and
mass shootings. As part of the implementation of the , the Nazi regime intended to organize the rounding up of approximately 80 million Russians and expel them beyond the
Urals. Nazi bureaucrats estimated that nearly 30 million Russians would have died during the planned
death marches to regions beyond the Urals, such as
Siberia. In addition, between 850,000–1,600,000 Jews were killed by Nazi forces in Ukraine during this period, with the assistance of local collaborators. Original Nazi plans advocated the extermination of 65 percent of 23.2 million Ukrainians, with the survivors treated as chattel slaves. Over 2,300,000 Ukrainians were deported to Germany and forced into Nazi slave labor. Nazi seizure of food supplies in Ukraine just like
Soviets did in 1932–33 brought about starvation, as it was intended to do to depopulate that region for German settlement. Soldiers were told to steel their hearts against starving women and children, because every bit of food given to them was stolen from the German people, endangering their nourishment.
Yugoslavia After
conquering Yugoslavia in April 1941, Nazi Germany partitioned the country and installed puppet dictatorships in
Serbia and
Croatia. Many of the
Yugoslavian territories were annexed by Germany, Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria. Despite the vast population of Slavs in Yugoslavia, Nazi Germany mainly focused on targeting the nation's Jewish and
Roma population. == Destruction of documents, post-war reconstruction ==